Martin Luther King Jr.’s oldest son and daughter-in-law spoke at the 2020 D.C. Women’s March, which took place during the MLK holiday weekend. However, Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy will be better honored at the March for Life than at the Women’s March.

Andrea Waters King said, “Each of us is made by our creator…[and we must] respect the dignity and worth of every man, woman and child.” Ironically, she said these words in front of a crowd that held countless pro-abortion signs, from “Safe abortion is a human right” and “No uterus, no opinion” to “I am not ovary reacting” and “Keep your tiny hands off my reproductive rights.”

The National Women’s March platform is broad, but it becomes clear to anyone who attends that there are two priorities: getting Donald Trump out of office (by any means necessary) and defending the right to an abortion.

When asked to name a policy that has hindered women’s equality, one woman immediately named health care. “They want all of those babies born,” she said, “but once they’re born they don’t want to help them at all.” Whenever women at the march mentioned health care, they were always referring to abortion.

One older woman who remembers having gone to the original women’s march in 1971 said she was marching on behalf of the Equal Rights Amendment, an amendment many pro-abortion activists hope will enshrine the right to abortion in the Constitution.

One woman dressed in a “Handmaid’s Tale” costume said that she believed reproductive rights were the gatekeeper for all women’s rights. She held a sign attached to a wire hanger that read, “Vote while you still can.” She argued that if women lose the right to an abortion they will eventually lose all other rights as well.

This is not the true legacy of the beloved civil rights leader. Martin Luther King Jr. was a religious man who strongly believed in the natural law. If he were alive today, it is far more likely that he would have lent his influence to the March for Life rather than to the vulgar National Women’s March.

For many years Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy has been hijacked by the left, who want to pretend he would agree with their definition of social justice. In reality, King believed in a fixed moral law, one that did not fluctuate according to evolving cultural standards. Leftists have also attempted to secularize King, forgetting that he was a reverend and that it was churches who rose up and organized the marches, boycotts, and sit-ins of the civil rights movement.

King is famous for writing in his Letter From a Birmingham Jail that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” He wrote that he could not sit idly by in Atlanta and not worry about what is happening in Birmingham.

While its highly likely that King would have something to say about the treatment of immigrants and other minorities in the United States, there is no way he would accept that abortion is settled law and thus just. King believed a just law needed to conform to the natural law. King of course put it best: “A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law… Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

King argued that segregation was unjust because it distorted the personality and put people into the category of things. What is abortion, if not the ultimate degradation of the human personality— and not just for the child, but for the mother as well?

A woman who aborts her baby is no less a mother than one who gives birth. The only difference is that she has now willfully destroyed a piece of herself. The famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass argued that slavery is just as morally degrading for the slave owner as it is for the slave, because it turns him into a tyrant.

Women who have abortions also never leave the procedure unscathed. The decision will have psychological effects on them for the rest of their lives. They might tell themselves that what they got rid of was a thing and not a person, but that “blob’s” little heartbeat and small fingerprints tell a different story. This is not justice.

A better representative of Martin Luther King Jr. is his niece, Alveda King. Alveda King is an avid pro-life activist. She was almost the victim of an abortion, but luckily her grandfather convinced his daughter to give birth instead. As a young woman, Alveda King had two abortions that left her scarred physically and emotionally. King calls herself a victim of abortion and has compassion for women who have gone through the same thing.

Today King works for various pro-life organizations. She is the executive director of outreach for a group called Civil Rights for the Unborn and is involved in Silent No More, a group that raises awareness about the physical and emotional pain abortion causes.

King believes the pro-life movement is logically consistent with the civil rights movement. Just as the civil rights movement worked to convince society that black men and women are fully human, she works to convince society that babies in the womb deserve legal recognition. “My dream for the unborn is that in America they will have the same dignity that all Americans deserve,” she said.

It is difficult for conservatives to take lefty virtue signaling seriously or to respect so-called “social justice warriors” when they believe killing more than 600,000 babies a year is a right instead of a crime. If one’s definition of justice does not entail protecting the weak, then it is not true justice.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this. In the most well-known portion of his “I have a Dream” speech, King declares that he looks forward to a day when little black boys and girls will be able to join hands with little white girls and boys in brotherhood. Can anyone honestly disagree that if King were here today he would not be fighting to give those little boys and girls a chance to be born in the first place?

Krystina Skurk is a research assistant at Hillsdale College in D.C. She received a Master's degree in politics from the Van Andel School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College. She is a former fellow of the John Jay Institute, a graduate of Regent University, and a former teacher at Archway Cicero, a Great Hearts charter school.